How often does this happen: you go to a movie and find that the characters are uninteresting, two-dimensional puppets that you don’t remotely care about, and the only justification you can find for the seven bucks you dropped at the box office — not to mention the additional fifteen you spent on snacks — is that the film is filled with amazing visual effects and ingenious new ways to damage property. All the time, right?

So how often does the exact opposite occur? I’m talking about seeing a movie in which you really like the characters and the basic premise, but the movie itself feels disappointingly short on spectacle. That’s a much rarer animal, even a bit of a paradox, and yet, such movies do exist. Case-in-point: Hellboy, a new film based on the comic book created in 1994 by Mike Mignola.

I haven’t read the comics, but the movie version of Mignola’s universe is a dizzying synthesis of familiar and beloved entertainments that includes hints of H.P. Lovecraft’s Old Ones, pulp heroes like Doc Savage and The Shadow, modern tabloid tales of monsters lurking in the sewers, and, of course, Nazis and an immortal Russian mystic. The titular character is a demon brought into our world as a baby in 1944 to help the Nazis destroy, well, everything. Before that could happen, however, this cute little beastie was intercepted by a British expert in the supernatural named Professor Broom. (Hellboy’s rather undignified name is bestowed on him by the Yankee GIs who accompanied Broom on his mission.)

Now, sixty years later, a full-grown Hellboy serves as the muscle for a secret organization called the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense. Professor Broom, who raised Hellboy as his own son, heads up the BPRD, leading the fight against “things that go bump in the night” while simultaneously trying to prevent the world’s population from learning of the horrors in their midst (think Men In Black crossed with Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Hellboy himself has become something of an urban legend in the last few decades, a mysterious creature often captured in grainy photographs that the Bureau’s FBI liason (played by reliable character actor Jeffrey Tambor) publicly dismisses as hoaxes and nonsense, while privately knowing that there really is a six-foot red demon rampaging around New York City, battling the forces of evil. As the film begins, the battle is about to really heat up — Grigory Rasputin, the sorcerer who brought Hellboy into our world, has been resurrected by his evil cohorts and is planning to complete the Armageddon he tried to unleash in 1944. The only creature that can stop him is the very same one Rasputin needs to trigger the End of the World: our hero, Hellboy.

The movie will likely please fans of the comic insomuch as it includes sub-plots, secondary characters and pieces of backstory that I assume come directly from the source material. In addition to Hellboy, the staff of the BPRD includes Abe Sapien, a blue amphibian with psychic abilities and a gentle soul; Liz, a pyrokinetic “firestarter” who has trouble controlling her abilities (and who also happens to be the object of Hellboy’s affections); and John Myers, a young FBI agent who has just been assigned as Hellboy’s handler. There are hints of a deep history behind all of these characters, notably Liz, who suffers from the memory of her mutant ability getting away from her when she was a child and immolating her entire apartment building. Even the characters who are obviously little more than cannon fodder are surprisingly fleshed out, especially the FBI agent who is always worried about whether his hair transplant looks natural enough (it doesn’t).

The performances are uniformly strong, even from the actors who have little screentime. John Hurt lends gravity and a genuine warmth to the older version of Professor Broom. David Hyde-Pierce, best known as Frasier‘s brother Niles, provides a suitably delicate voice for Abe Sapien, and Ron Perlman is simply great as the world-weary, blue-collar lug that is Hellboy. It takes a particular type of talent to act successfully beneath outlandish make-up and prosthetics, and few are as good at it as Perlman (his portfolio of latex-heavy roles includes TV’s Beauty and the Beast, Blade II, and Star Trek: Nemesis). He is immensely likable as Hellboy, a character who uses his sardonic wit to conceal the pain of having to forever hide from the ordinary people of the world.

There is, in fact, a great deal of humor in Hellboy, a refreshing difference from so many other comic-book movies that take themselves so seriously. Some of this humor is quite silly, such as the running gag of a six-foot-tall red demon loving little kittens, while other examples are more clever and linguistic in nature. There is also genuine pathos in this film, arising both from the deaths of several well-liked characters and from Hellboy’s jealousy of Myers’ relationship with Liz. (His jealousy, in fact, leads to a moment that is simultaneously one of the film’s most touching and funniest scenes: Hellboy, spying on Myers and Liz from an apartment rooftop, is discovered by a young boy. Rather than running in fear from this monster, the boy brings HB a plate of cookies and joins in the stakeout.)

From a purely technical point-of-view, the film is well-made, with some interesting camera angles and outstanding visual effects. Abe Sapien is especially fascinating, a combination of costume and computer-generated imagery that is even more realistic-looking than Hellboy himself. The fight scenes are inventive and comprehensible, which is, sadly, all too uncommon these days. And the movie has a real streak of morality in its final scenes, when Hellboy must choose whether to release his demonic nature for selfish purposes or suffer for the sake of the entire world. Essentially, he has to choose whether he’s going to be a man or a monster, and although there’s little doubt of which way he’s going to go — he is a superhero, after all — it’s still an interesting moral discussion.

Unfortunately, even with all these ticks in the “positive” column, I can’t say that Hellboy is entirely successful. The story feels flabby somehow; I can’t think of any scenes that we could live without, but there just isn’t any propulsive force driving us toward a climax. In much the same way that the first X-Men movie felt like 90 minutes of exposition followed by a quick and not-very-satisfying ending, Hellboy feels more like a pilot episode for a TV series than a cohesive, stand-alone film. We’ve been introduced to the characters and their world, we’ve enjoyed getting the lay of the land, but now we’re running out of time and we’ll just have to wait until the next episode for things to really get interesting.

Final analysis: I do recommend Hellboy based largely on the fact that I liked the characters and the performances (and also because I’m a sucker for movies about shadowy heroes fighting the forces of evil beneath the very noses of us common folk), but I wish there had been more of a sense of urgency about the proceedings. I’m assuming that the intention of this movie is to start a franchise; for whatever it’s worth, I will gladly see Hellboy 2. I guess that saying a movie was good enough to get me to want another movie about these characters is pretty high praise these days.